Friday

Dead City

Someone's nightmare broods
on the rim of my waking sleep;
it wears a man's clothes, a child's smile,
and it leans, a malevolent slant,
in the recessed doorways of periphery.

It moves by me down night streets,
past buildings like tombstones.
Gutterplates and cornerstones
bear names of the irrelevant doomed;
anathema writ by those who came before.

Now it's ahead, tripping the dark fantastic
along the edge of my watering lid,
a lurid writhe in rhythm to the hiss of my mind.
It beckons, silent coos of seduction,
drawing near the cold press of it's regard.

The city is haunted.
Winds keen through barren streets,
pushes past buildings like watchful crypts,
scatters faces on the skittering strains of a howl.

I see it beyond,
someone's nightmare dancing with my own;
one mad ghost entwined with another.

GRIND IT UP AND SPIT IT OUT, THEY SAID

Eat Your Words

"I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we don't."— Dylan Thomas